I am the least competitive of people. If you can hear guffawing, it is coming from one Greg Dixon – the author of last week’s column, which was the greatest amount of codswallop ever to appear in The Good Life. And that’s saying something.
The issue of competitiveness has arisen because we still haven’t finished playing the game of Wairarapa Monopoly. Or rather, we are not playing. One of the competitors, despite being the least competitive of people, may be sulking. I may or may not, as he claimed, have pinched 200 bucks from his funds and then, having had an unaccustomed crisis of conscience, may or may not have put it back.
For this, I was maligned, if not defamed, as being a “hopeless recidivist”, like my father before me. It is true that I come from a long line of criminals. My family are not very good at being white-collar crooks. They always get caught. If I pinched that dosh and if I put it back – there is no actual evidence of a crime having taken place – at least it can be said that I have learnt from history. When a Hewitson attempts to be a sticky fingers they will inevitably get their paws caught in the till.
In my defence, should a defence be needed, that Dixon character has somehow, suspiciously, scooped up twice as many properties as I have. And he’s sitting on a stash of cash. I am not. I currently have $471. I estimate that he has about five grand. I can’t risk counting it because, when inevitably caught, I would again be accused of being light-fingered.
But I have a question for the jury: how could that Dixon character, a failed accountancy student, have come by such a stash honestly? He was very quick to anoint himself The Banker. This was because, he implied, I was so thick at maths that I wasn’t allowed to sit School C maths and instead had to sit the exam for dunces. I got 22%.
Here is proof of my being the least competitive of people. At Kaitaia Primary School, I was one of only two girls who were decreed to be incapable of playing netball. The other girl was on crutches. I couldn’t have cared less.
I was turfed out of the primary school choir; I couldn’t hold a tune. I couldn’t have cared less. Like Marge Simpson, I have long maintained that “music is none of my business”. Years ago, I stopped entering those daft annual journo awards that ancient hacks tragically enter every year. Who could care less?
But take me on at Scrabble, or maybe Monopoly, and something weird happens. I may have once overturned a Scrabble board when my opponent got all seven letters on the board, earning him the coveted 50 points.
When I was young, we used to play Monopoly as a family. My little brother was a terrible cheat. He would pinch money from the bank and hide it under the board. He was a Hewitson through and through. Had he lived past the age of 10 he would either have been a top lawyer or a “hopeless recidivist”.
I am far too busy to finish playing that rigged game of Monopoly. This is the time of year in the garden at Lush Places where you have to make the time to wander about and just look. The spring garden is in its last glorious flush and you have to fix it in your mind. The roses have been particularly wonderful this year.
In autumn, Greg moved five of the Duchesse de Montebello, a gift from those gardening-mad jokers up the Waingawa River, to adorn the resting place of Jimmy River. He was the lamb of former milkmaid Charlotte, and he used to come here for lambie daycare when she was milking Miles the sheep farmer’s ewes.
The Duchesse is a splendidly robust rose, despite her dainty appearance and intoxicating fragrance. Jimmy River used to spend his days helpfully pruning my roses so, as Charlotte wrote when I sent her a picture of the relocated Duchesse de Montebello, “He will be in heaven.”
